Gaza

If I make this a theme of poetry more than once this year, it is because caught in the struggle, no one seems to care of children shot or mutilated. There's a blame game going on, and innocent lives caught in the middle suffer. I come again and again, thinking of the children, and this verse often comes to my mind: "It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble". These are crimes against humanity, as Rory Stewart said recently, and I concur. 

There is a hymn: "All people that on Earth do dwell / Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice." There is not much cheer or singing in the Gaza where infrastructure in Gaza, including roads, water and electricity, is left in ruins by Israeli attacks, and people survive in refugee camps, their homes bombed out and destroyed. I have taken the hymn, and reworded it to better reflect the situation there. Pray for peace, for the sake of the children there.

Gaza

In refugee camps they dwell
Sob and cry with tearful voice
Those full of fear, despair they tell
Come their enemies who rejoice

Gaza, you know, is ruined indeed
The missile strikes do there unmake
Those wretched folk, no aid to feed
And rifle fire the children take

The hospitals they bomb and raise
The lack of food takes many too
The evil legacy of men lives on always
And it is wicked so to do.

For why? Forgotten the common good
For no mercy found is sure
Rubble where the homes once stood
And long those suffering here endure